Page 532 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

accompanist” but a top pianist by any standards, in another Larcher masterwork, recorded but
not until Sunday afternoon performed live.

Unerzählt (Unrecounted) is a collection composed between 2018 and 2021, setting self-styled
“micropoems” by WG Sebald, who not only famously meditated upon a journey through Suffolk
landscapes in The Rings of Saturn, but also settled as a PhD student and later as Chair of
Literature at the University of East Anglia (he died suddenly, if not – to himself, at least –
completely unexpectedly, of a heart attack at the age of 57 while driving to his home in
Poringland south-east of Norwich). The voice makes every syllable, every vowel sound count in a
feat of sustained line, but it’s the pianist who has to jump through hoops to conjure a rainbow of
sounds from within and around the instrument. Drake told us how grateful he was to have
Larcher not only as page turner but also as fellow technician for the most complicated post-
Cageian adjustments – the most daunting of all to conjure a plane taking off in the fifth song,
where Sebald baldly states that “On 8 May 1927 the pilots Nungesser & Coli took off from Le
Bourget and after that were never seen again” (Drake and Larcher pictured below).

If this suggests rampant avant-gardism, that’s very far from the case. Larcher uses tonality, major
and minor triads, with pinpoint precision. Metaphysics are conjured spellbindingly up to that
airplane song, when mankind enters the equation, only to prove unequal to forces beyond its
control. Rarely have I heard an auditorium more intensely silent. Without that part of what Britten
called the magic triangle – composer, work, audience – the effect would not have been as
shattering as it turned out.